India’s Hero as a Film’s Extra

 

India’s Hero as a Film’s Extra

 

First published in St. Nicholas Magazine (December 1893) and reprinted in the collection of short stories – ‘The Jungle Book’ (1894), Toomai of the Elephants is a short story by Rudyard Kipling about a young elephant-handler. It tells about a young Indian mahout (elephant driver) who has ambitions to become a great hunter, and has the chance to reach his goal when he charms an Englishman into letting him join his ambitious expedition.

The book by Kipling

Interestingly, the character of Petersen Sahib in the story is thought to be modelled on the famous British naturalist George P. Sanderson who used to work in the public works department in the princely state of Mysore. He devised a system to capture wild elephants and was popularly known as the ‘Elephant King’.

George Sanderson and Prince Albert Victor

 

At that point of time, Robert Flaherty was already a pretty well known name for his filmmaking abilities. Because of the success of his earlier ventures – ‘Nanook of the North’ (1922) and ‘Man of Aran’ (1934), Hungarian-born British filmmaker Alexander Korda agreed to finance a similar film set in India. When Flaherty suggested the story of a young boy and his elephant, Korda advised him to use Kipling's short story ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ as the basic inspiration.

Robert Flaherty

 

The film ‘Elephant Boy’ was duly launched and Flaherty arrived with his unit in India in May 1935. After eight months of filming, which included many unfortunate delays due to Indian monsoons, Korda became concerned over the spiraling cost of his ambitious project. During that period, already triple the film's original budget was exhausted. Korda then sent Louis Monta Bell to India in order to fasttrack the production. Later, they were joined in India by Korda's brother Zoltan , who was in charge of a second camera unit.

Monta Bell

 

In January 1936, the climactic ‘keddah’ sequence, which was the capture of eighty wild elephants into a giant enclosure, was finally filmed. It took eight days to drive the elephant herd into the stockade, requiring to assistance of 1,100 natives, thirty-six mahouts on elephants, 200 ‘beaters’ and ten government officials; the stockade itself took fifteen days to build, and was made up of over 10,000 pieces of lumber; and the capture itself was the largest in the history of the Mysore district.

A scene from the movie

 

The onscreen credits include an acknowledgment of the assistance of His Highness, the Maharajah of Mysore. According to the film’s pressbook, the production required fifteen months of location filming in India, as well as two months of supplemental filming of interior sequences at the Denham Studios of London Films. According to New York Times, while searching for his on-screen Toomai, Flaherty met Captain Ralph Fremlin, a coffee plantation owner and well-known big-game hunter, whom he decided to cast in the role of Petersen Sahib.

This was also the first film for actor Sabu, who was discovered after eight weeks of painstaking search at the plantations of India by Osmond Borradaile, the Chief Cameraman of the project. Finally, Borradaile discovered Sabu in the Mysore palace elephant stables, as the twelve-year-old orphan's father had been one of the Maharajah's mahouts. Quite curiously, the young boy's life so closely paralleled the film's story that some of Sabu's real life experiences were incorporated into the film.

Sabu

In June 1936, filming in India was completed, with approximately 3,00,000 feet of footage shot. With no clear story-line, Korda decided to incorporate a story devised by John Collier into the India footage, which was then filmed at Denham Studios under the direction of Zoltan Korda. Sabu was taken to England for shooting, but Captain Fremlin was unable to go. He was eventually replaced by Walter Hudd.

Poster of the movie

When the 82-minute film opened two years later, it was a big financial success, though this belied numerous problems that befell its production. The National Board of Review rated ‘Elephant Boy’ as one of the best foreign language films of 1937. Zoltan Korda and Robert Flaherty were chosen the Best Directors at the 1937 Venice Film Festival.

Udham Singh and O'Dwyer

Interestingly, the 1937-film is back in the public memory because of a certain Ram Mohammad Singh Azad (better known to us as Udham Singh) who acted in this movie as an ‘extra’ to earn some extra money to support the revolutionary activities of Ghadar Party. Just three years later, on the fateful day of 13^th March 1940, he assassinated Michael O’Dwyer – the man responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, at Caxton Hall, London.